843. Guess the Word

Description

This problem is an interactive problem new to the LeetCode platform.

We are given a word list of unique words, each word is 6 letters long, and one word in this list is chosen as secret.

You may call master.guess(word) to guess a word. The guessed word should have type string and must be from the original list with 6 lowercase letters.

This function returns an integer type, representing the number of exact matches (value and position) of your guess to the secret word. Also, if your guess is not in the given wordlist, it will return -1 instead.

For each test case, you have 10 guesses to guess the word. At the end of any number of calls, if you have made 10 or less calls to master.guess and at least one of these guesses was the secret, you pass the testcase.

Besides the example test case below, there will be 5 additional test cases, each with 100 words in the word list. The letters of each word in those testcases were chosen independently at random from ‘a’ to ‘z’, such that every word in the given word lists is unique.

Example 1:
Input: secret = “acckzz”, wordlist = [“acckzz”,“ccbazz”,“eiowzz”,“abcczz”]

Explanation:

master.guess(“aaaaaa”) returns -1, because “aaaaaa” is not in wordlist.
master.guess(“acckzz”) returns 6, because “acckzz” is secret and has all 6 matches.
master.guess(“ccbazz”) returns 3, because “ccbazz” has 3 matches.
master.guess(“eiowzz”) returns 2, because “eiowzz” has 2 matches.
master.guess(“abcczz”) returns 4, because “abcczz” has 4 matches.

We made 5 calls to master.guess and one of them was the secret, so we pass the test case.
Note: Any solutions that attempt to circumvent the judge will result in disqualification.

Problem URL

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Solution

LeetCode的第一道交互类型的题目，给一个String数组，String长度都为6，一个master 对象可以调用guess() 来猜secret字符，返回值为match的字符个数。十次能猜到就算过。

We use a for loop to perform 10 guess. Select a word randomly from wordlist then guess it using master. Then perform a iteration on wordlist, find the words have same mathes with guess add them into a list, then assign this list to wordlist using toArray().

Code

/**
 * // This is the Master's API interface.
 * // You should not implement it, or speculate about its implementation
 * interface Master {
 *     public int guess(String word) {}
 * }
 */
class Solution {
    public void findSecretWord(String[] wordlist, Master master) {
        for (int i = 0, m = 0; i < 10 && m < 6; i++){
            String guess = wordlist[new Random().nextInt(wordlist.length)];
            m = master.guess(guess);
            List<String> newWordlist = new ArrayList<>();
            for (String w : wordlist){
                if (matches(w, guess) == m){
                    newWordlist.add(w);
                }
            }
            wordlist = newWordlist.toArray(new String[newWordlist.size()]);
        }     
    }
    
    private int matches(String a, String b){
        int count = 0;
        for (int i = 0; i < a.length(); i++){
            if (a.charAt(i) == b.charAt(i)){
                count++;
            }
        }
        return count;
    }
}

Time Complexity: O(n)
Space Complexity: O(n)

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Review

A guarranted worst case ten time approach

public void findSecretWord(String[] wordlist, Master master) {
        for (int i = 0, x = 0; i < 10 && x < 6; ++i) {
            HashMap<String, Integer> count = new HashMap<>();
            for (String w1 : wordlist)
                for (String w2 : wordlist)
                    if (match(w1, w2) == 0)
                        count.put(w1, count.getOrDefault(w1 , 0) + 1);
            Pair<String, Integer> minimax = new Pair<>("", 1000);
            for (String w : wordlist)
                if (count.getOrDefault(w, 0) < minimax.getValue())
                    minimax = new Pair<>(w, count.getOrDefault(w, 0));
            x = master.guess(minimax.getKey());
            List<String> wordlist2 = new ArrayList<String>();
            for (String w : wordlist)
                if (match(minimax.getKey(), w) == x)
                    wordlist2.add(w);
            wordlist = wordlist2.toArray(new String[0]);
        }
    }